CCleaner v5.45 Pulled Due to Anger Over Usage Data Collection

It has not been a good week for Piriform’s PC cleaning tool CCleaner. With the release of CCleaner version 5.45, it was quickly discovered that the program’s “Active Monitoring” component, which is utilized to send anonymous usage data back to Piriform, could no longer be disabled.

First discovered by Ghacks.net, users of version 5.45 discovered that unlike previous versions there was no privacy setting that allowed you to disable the sending of anonymous usage information to Piriform.

Even if you tried to disable Active Monitoring so that the usage data was not sent, it would be enabled again on the next restart.

“While you may go to Options > Monitoring to disable “Enable system monitoring” and “Enable Active Monitoring” there, you will notice that the monitoring turns itself on again on the next start” explained the Ghacks article.

To make matters worse, this new version of CCleaner would not terminate when you closed the Window, but would instead be minimized to the Windows tray and the icon provided no way to close the program. The only way to close CCleaner was to forcefully terminate it via Task Manager.

With a huge install base and the program promoting itself as offering “Privacy Protection”, you can imagine the outcry that was unleashed over these new changes in the version 5.45 of CCleaner.

Due to this, in an announcement on their forums, Piriform has stated that they have pulled version v5.45 and made the the v5.44 the latest one available for download. They went on to say that they would be splitting the cleaning alerts and anonymous usage data into separate controls, with different settings for each, and provide the ability to easily terminate the program.

Thank you all for your continued feedback (positive and negative, it all helps). I wanted to give a quick progress update on what we’re doing. We’re currently working on separating out cleaning functionality from analytics reporting and offering more user control options which will be remembered when CCleaner is closed. We’re also creating a factsheet to share which will outline the data we collect, for which purposes and how it is processed.

Today we have removed v5.45 and reverted to v5.44 as the main download for CCleaner while we work on a new version with several key improvements. You can grab version 5.44 from one of the links below:

As stated before, we’ll split cleaning alerts (which don’t send any data) from UI trend data (which is anonymous and only there to measure the user experience) and provide a separate setting for each in the user preferences. Some of these features run as a separate process from the UI: we’ll restore visibility of this in the notifications area, and you’ll be able to close it down from that icon menu as before.

We understand the importance of this to you all. This work is our number 1 priority and we are taking the time to get it right in the next release. There are numerous changes required, so that does mean it will take weeks, not days. While we work on this, we have removed version 5.45 and reinstated version 5.44.

If I was them, when they release the new version they should jump directly to v5.46 and let v5.45 be forgotten.